THE shrieks echoed around Australia's boardrooms but, more pointedly, around its newsrooms. The Greens were about to take control of the Senate! The media and corporate elites circled the wagons and dragged the political elites in after them.

LAKE ELMO, Minn. — The receptionists at Bachmann & Associates, the Christian counseling center run by the husband of the presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, were polite but firm in turning a reporter away the other day. A new sign was on the door. “Bachmann & Associates,” it said, “prohibits all soliciting, filming and photography in this building. NO MEDIA.”

Early in the week that ended with New York enacting same-sex marriage, the Rev. Anna Taylor Sweringen stood in a hallway just outside the State Senate chambers. She wore her clerical collar and held a sign saying, “Equality now.” Around her gathered ministers and rabbis of similar sentiment, all in Albany to lobby and pray for the right of gay couples to wed.